Mega Passed Its First Copyright Takedown Test

In addition to protecting itself from your pirated content with its see-no-evil encryption, Kim Dotcom's Mega service aims to stay on the law's good side by playing nicely with copyright takedown requests and keeping that super important DMCA safe harbor status. So far so good, too; it's responded to an early batch of requests with all due speed and efficiency.

In this first week that Mega has been in working order, the services has been juggling a whopping 500 uploads per second, according to Dotcom. And we all know a bunch of that is probably infringing. So far, at least one anti-piracy group has been able to see through the encryption haze and spot some stuff that shouldn't be on there. LeakID, a content managing service, submitted five DMCA-like takedown requests to Mega last week, pertaining to copyright infringing episodes of Naruto that were floating around. And according to Numerama, all five came down in 48 hours.

That's a good start if Mega wants to maintain a strained, but not openly hostile relationship with rightsholders and law enforcement, but there are a few caveats. First of all, five out of what must now be several billion files is a drop in the drop in the bucket. Second, because of that encryption, Mega ostensibly doesn't/can't verify what it's really taking down. But while you'd expect that number of takedown requests to increase exponentially (and it might), smart use of encryption by users should make infringing files harder to find, and significantly throttle the flow of takedowns Mega has to perform.

All in all, the full force back-and-forth between Mega and rightsholders hasn't gotten up to speed and humming quite yet, but it looks like Mega's definitely making an effort so far. And with everyone watching, how could it afford not to? [Numerama via Torrentfreak]